Wind River's Linux transformation (ZDNet) [LWN.net]

Wind River's upgrade to Linux

Posted May 13, 2005 3:17 UTC (Fri) by bajw (guest, #11712) [Link]

I don't know, but would pretty confidently bet a nickle they have been finding Linux to be a significant upgrade from VxWorks, and market forces are making them convert to the better platform in order to remain competitive in their field. My guess is their old proprietary system has flatly been outperformed by Linux.

Wind River's upgrade to Linux

Posted May 13, 2005 7:54 UTC (Fri) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

> My guess is their old proprietary system has flatly been
> outperformed by Linux.

Since Linux has never been explicitly designed nor optimised for the
kinds of devices VxWorks has, I doubt very much that's true. VxWorks
lacks many of the advances Linux has made in recent years -- but
I'd be surprised if VxWorks didn't beat recent Linux versions in
performance, and more importantly latency, on small single-processor
systems.

Actually it's probably more trouble than it's worth to build a Linux
2.6 kernel for a machine with less than several megabytes of RAM;
even if you could make it fit, you would do so by throwing away all
the lovely page tables and other spendthrift data structures which
have made Linux do so well on modern servers and PCs.

(Not having done this myself, I can't actually vouch for it.)

Wind River's upgrade to Linux

Posted May 13, 2005 17:39 UTC (Fri) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link]

Page tables is such a bad example... Someday you will probably realise how funny your comment was. :P

Wind River's Linux transformation (ZDNet)

Posted May 13, 2005 9:55 UTC (Fri) by simlo (subscriber, #10866) [Link]

It depends on whichs parts of VxWorks you use. If you use the core, i.e. the scheduler, I would have no problems with it. It just _works_. If you start to use all their add-ons: They are crap. The functionality is 95% there so you think you can use it but once you have deployed your stuff the last 5% starts to hit you and give a lot of trouble.

VxWorks is good for a small, well defined project where you can make an combined OS-application image and burn it into a flash or a prom and skip it with the device. But once you start to do more dynamic stuff like loading an application in the middle of it or just running a lot of different services it sucks compared to Linux. Also the hardware support for common devices lacks in vxWorks compared to Linux.

BUT Linux isn't deterministic real-time although Ingo is working hard on getting it detterministic. But Linux will not obtain the low interrupt and task latencies of vxWorks. Linux will probably get to 50-100 us whereas vxWorks is down to 1-10 us on a typical embedded target.

Wind River's Linux transformation (ZDNet)

Posted May 28, 2005 21:48 UTC (Sat) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599) [Link]

Also the hardware support for common devices lacks in vxWorks compared to Linux.

That's for darned sure. Their USB stack blows, for example--things that Just Work on Linux (which is lots and lots of things) require weeks or months of support calls and workarounds with VxWorks.

But Linux will not obtain the low interrupt and task latencies of vxWorks. Linux will probably get to 50-100 us whereas vxWorks is down to 1-10 us on a typical embedded target.

It won't come close to hitting VxWorks' footprint, either. But that's OK--they're different OSes with different markets (i.e., target hardware). Wind River's problem is that the market for the minimalist hardware on which VxWorks shines is rapidly vanishing.

Greg

Wind River's Linux transformation (ZDNet)

Posted May 14, 2005 9:59 UTC (Sat) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link]

Well, NASA uses vxWorks in the Mars Rovers so *someone* is impressed enough by it's reliability.